


The Meeting of Spirits

by euphorbic



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Boys Kissing, Jargon, Kyudo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 15:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/901832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphorbic/pseuds/euphorbic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by <a href="http://comew.tumblr.com/post/55882139877/happy-birthday-my-dear-friend-sheen-d">Comew's Erik/Charles kyudo art</a>.</p><p>Trying to focus on his form while Erik is touching him proves to be the challenge Charles needs to take his kyudo skills to the next level.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meeting of Spirits

**Author's Note:**

> I used a lot of kyudo jargon, because most of the names sound a little ridiculous in English. For example, tenouchi (手の内) literally means 'inside hand', but you can think of it as simply 'grip'. 
> 
> Or kiai: 気 (spirit) + 合 (meet)

* * *

 

“Don’t pull back with your hand,” Erik murmured to Charles as he pulled the string back via the notched resin within the kake’s hard thumb. “Shoulders down, pull back with your elbow.”

It had taken less time for them to go to bed together than it had for Lehnsherr to allow Charles to start formal practice with the other Kyudo-ka in the UK Kyudojo. Charles was still only allowed two arrows during formal practice while most of the regular practitioners had the full five. Still, it was progress after six months of practices he attended three times a week. Erik was harder on him than the others due to the nature of their relationship.

“Your hikiwake starts out good,” Erik continued, voice even and low, if a little rough from smoking. “But you lose form on the way to kai.”

He slowly took his hands from Charles’ kake-clad hand and the one the arrow was resting on. Charles missed the touch of his hands and the light press of Erik’s chest against his back. “Shall I go back to uchiokochi?”

“No,” Erik sighed, and his breath disturbed the hair at the nape of Charles’ neck.

 _Bastard!_ Charles thought as his skin turned to goose flesh. He doubted Erik knew he’d done it; he took Kyudo seriously and couldn’t be seduced on the hand-polished hard wood floor of the dojo, the hand-trimmed, grassy arrow-path, or even in the dojo’s small office. The men’s changing room, however, had been a different story.

Charles found himself remembering the heated tryst they’d enjoyed against the lockers a few weeks ago. The way he’d unraveled Erik’s control before he’d even been able to untie his hakama. The moans Erik had swallowed as one of his ingenious hands had worked him under dogi, hakama, and boxers.

“Go back to ugamae. I’ll guide you the whole way, but just forget I’m here or I’ll have to turn your training over to Ororo.”

It wasn’t that Charles didn’t want to work with Ororo; she was the highest ranked member of the group after their sensei. In her last rank test, Ororo had made fourth dan. Both she and Erik had the right to wear kimono under their hakama. (Though the way Erik had to remove his left sleeve for shooting and thus reveal half his chest was something that drove Charles to distraction.)

No, he liked Ororo, but even though she outranked Erik and made a better teacher to boot, Charles was still very much in the honeymoon stage of their relationship. Thus Charles much preferred to have Erik instruct him. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite as good at compartmentalization as Erik and having his heat and breath to distract him meant Charles often had lapses of concentration while being instructed.

Slowly, Charles lifted the yumi back up into the air into a half-hearted uchiokochi, the motion naturally released the tension between string and layers of bamboo and resin. He brought the long, asymmetrical bow back down and rested the bottom end on the top of his left foot. The arrow’s nock remained seated on the string, but he hooked his left index finger over the shaft to anchor the arrow against the black leather of the simple grip.

He closed his eyes, placed his gloved hand near his hip and breathed in through his nose and let it out, hissing, through his mouth. He dispelled the chill Erik’s breath had brought his neck and the insistent heat that had consequently begun to tie his loins in knots.

As he had been trained, he concentrated on his abdomen where his power should be centered and breathed in through his nose a few more times. Gradually, he added the bow to his focus. A few breaths later he brought in the arrow. Finally, he drew the target into the equation, brought them together, overlaid them, and blended them until, in his mind, all were one.

“Good ashibumi,” Erik suddenly said from behind. Charles didn’t even glance down to verify his footing; he could feel the balance coming up from his stance.

Opening his eyes, he lifted the bow with his left hand and settled the end on his knee. His gloved hand he settled on his hip. Technically, Erik had told him to start from yugamae which was right before raising the bow, but he was starting from dozokuri, where he would adjust his torso and focus. Had he been in a Japanese dojo, his decision would have been disrespectful. Thankfully, Erik wasn’t their sensei and trusted him to know himself enough to occasionally flout private instruction.

But that didn’t matter, that was nothing. He pulled his mind from trivialities, dispersed conscious thought, and sent his focus back to his abdomen, the bow, the arrow, the target waiting for him just beyond the ya-michi. They existed with him in one eternal round.

Slowly, Charles brought his right hand off his hip. He reached forward and maneuvered his deerskin kake around the string, hooking it with the resin notch hidden within the thumb’s crease. Turning his wrist just so, he took the yumi’s weight by the string and freed his left hand to take a new grip on the red bow’s black leather grip.

Grip was, arguably, the most important physical part of shooting. The Japanese bow, though asymmetrical, was relatively simple and necessitated a complicated grip; one that was just tight enough to keep in one’s hand, yet, light enough that when the string was released the force would create a parabola. When done properly, the bow would swing around gracefully, the string gently kissing the back of the kyudo-ka’s hand.

Twisting his hand carefully onto the grip, index finger pointing out and keeping the arrow from dropping down, Charles knew right away that his grip was good. It would change in a few moments when the bow turned in the grip during daisan and hikiwake.

“Good tenouchi,” Erik said, and though his voice registered warmly within Charles’ abdomen, it did not incite his lust and he was not distracted.

Next, he pulled in his gut and leaned forward slightly to distribute his weight more properly to the balls of his feet. Charles imagined lines of power traveling his legs through his feet and into the dojo floor and back up again.

Posture straight, feet set, Charles turned his head to the left. He tried not to think about Erik’s locker room confession that the act of turning his head to sight the target was when Charles’ neck was at its most lovely and powerful. It was difficult, but luckily Erik made none of his minute tells that might indicate he was transfixed by the sight just under his nose.

The moment Charles saw the paper-covered target, he felt a slight charge within his chest. It wasn’t something he’d felt before and it almost startled him out of his focus. Fortunately, the amount of concentration required to ignore Erik was more than capable of defending against the new obstacle.

With the same slow grace as before, Charles began to raise his hands from yugamae into uchiokochi. It was a troublesome part for him; his shoulders always wanted to come up with his arms. Luckily, Erik was right there, gently pushing down on his shoulders, smoothing them until Charles could relax them and let them fall even as his arms finished overhead extension.

“Good, good,” Erik encouraged soothingly. “Relax.”

Charles kept his focus. The next part was a simple movement of his arms, one that he’d found a somewhat silly joy in for so minor a part. Pulling the bow required a two-part movement, the first of which was daisan. All he had to do was let his wrists, arms still extended over his head, fall to the left, parallel to the floor.

As ever, he performed a textbook perfect daisan. Erik didn’t compliment the smoothness of his daisan transition anymore, saying it was as inevitable as rain in spring. Charles missed it, but the irk had no place within him as he came to the most difficult part; the completion of hikiwake into kai.

“Open up,” Erik said in the lowest, deepest tone he reserved for Charles; it was the one thing of Erik in the dojo that was his and his alone. “Pull the string with your elbow, not your hand, not your wrist. Open your chest and bow with your arms.”

Moving with the slow inevitably that characterized all the zen arts, Charles began to pull his arms apart. He tried to visualize his arms opening up along a straight line with the target an intersecting plane in and outside his vision. His left arm advanced along the front of it and his elbow pulled along the back simultaneously.

Despite his focus, his shoulders continue to tense. Erik’s bare hands were there, smoothing over his shoulders and out across his biceps, helpfully brushing along the line Charles was intent upon.

Just before his arms were fully extended into kai, a not-uncommon movement against his thumb announced the forward half of the arrow slipping off his left hand. Still nocked and held to the string by his kake, it did not fall to the floor. Without thinking, Charles did what most people did in the same situation: he turned his head, caught the wooden shaft with his lips, and pulled it back into place onto his thumb.

Probably he heard Erik make a noise behind him, but the pull was calling him. He completed hikiwake and was perfectly placed, head facing the target once again. With hardly a thought for what he was doing, Charles fell into kai.

And it felt so natural, so perfect, like that moment right before the drive toward orgasm. A moment of teetering on some metaphysical edge.

He didn’t even feel hanare. His wrist turned, glove disengaging from the string to fall back along the imagined line, but he heard the string whip through the air, felt both the arrow’s fletching brush the corner of his mouth and the movement of air that disheveled his fringe.

Across the grassy arrow-path, the arrow flew, and pierced the black center of the paper-covered target with a sharp pop. Nearly simultaneously Charles felt the tsuru, for the very first time, gently come to rest against the back of his forearm.

Behind him, Erik sucked in a hissing breath. Charles didn’t react, still in the zone of his practice, arms fully extended. He’d never felt a more natural, more beautiful zanshin. Who was he kidding? Charles had never truly felt zanshin at all. For a full moment he held the pose then as the fleeting feeling passed by, he dropped both hands to his hips, eyes still on the arrow, jutting out just left of center.

He let out a low breath, then finally broke his concentration to look over his shoulder at Erik. “I… Erik, I _felt_ something…!”

Erik’s expression might have been neutral to anyone else, but Charles had seen his tells before and saw the way his nostrils flared slightly as he breathed in. “My G-d, Charles,” he said, “if you do that at a test you’ll make shodan at the very least. That was one of the most beautiful hanare I’ve ever seen.”

“I didn’t even feel myself do the release!” Charles grinned and held up his gloved hand and swung it back to display a quick approximation of hanare. “And I felt kiai; the meeting of the spirit! I’ve never felt anything before! But I just felt it! And the yumi spun in my hand the way it’s supposed to, instead of the half turn I usually get.”

On the heels of Erik’s subdued astonishment came a broad grin. Laughing quietly, he stepped into Charles’ space, and slipped his arms around his back to sink his hands between Charles' dogi and hakema. He gripped the tightly wound hakema ties and pulled Charles close.

“Congratulations.” Erik leaned down, his cheek brushing Charles' so he could whisper in his ear. “I can’t even tell you how sexy it is every time I see you grab the damn arrows with your lips.”

Concentration well and truly shattered by Erik’s rare lack of Kyudojo decorum, Charles turned his head and whispered back. “As if I don’t nearly tent my hakama when you do hadanaugi-dosa in a formal setting. You should leave the left sleeve off all the time. Why don’t you do it for me right now?”

With one hand holding his bow and the other hampered by the stiff deerskin glove, Charles was at a distinct disadvantage. Still, with nobody else in the dojo and Erik wavering on the edge of his usual stoicism, he didn’t need his hands in order to take control of the situation.

Charles leaned forward, completing the full body press Erik had begun by pulling their abdomens together. He then let thrust himself up on his toes; the slide of his chest against Erik’s brought his face to Erik’s. He smashed their lips together.

Immediately he felt Erik’s mouth part and his tongue lick forward against Charles’ lips. Moaning, Charles opened his mouth so their tongues could fence in the joined space between them. There was nothing Charles could do with his bow hand, but he could still use his gloved hand to press against the back of Erik’s head.

And so Charles won yet another first; Erik’s consensual kiss there in the middle of the dojo. It was at least as good as kiai had been.


End file.
